Tag Archives: balloon animal

We had a busy week at Rancho Bizarro. As I mentioned in last week’s post, we adopted a Mexican street dog as a companion to our dog, Jemima, whom we brought down here to Mexico from what used to be the United States. The new dog is four months old and is recovering from a broken leg which she sustained from an unsuccessful encounter with an automobile while she was still on the streets. Today’s cartoon is about a dog in a cone collar because of an injury to its rear hip area, which is exactly where our dog’s stitches are (from the surgery that inserted a metal pin) and what’s notable about that is that I wrote and drew this cartoon four weeks ago, before I knew of our new dog’s existence. Spooky? Only if you’re prone to reading coincidences as messages from another dimension. Still, it’s kind of funny.

Her full name is Monita Chichita but we’ll mostly call her Monita, which we kind of made up. “Mono” is the Spanish word for “monkey,” and by our our gringo logic, adding an “ita” to the end both feminizes it and means she is little, so we think it means “little monkey girl”. “Chichita” is a word we found on a list of dirty words that our Spanish teacher gave us that supposedly means “small boobs”. (I know that’s not all that dirty, but a lot of the other words on the list are filthy. FYI: If you want to say “big boobs,” it is “chichota” according to the smut list.)

I mentioned recently that I like ventriloquism gags and here is another one.

Surprisingly, this cartoon only garnered one complaint from a vegan/animal rights type person. I’m a fan of the artisanal movement toward hand-made goods but, like all trends, there are those who will take it too far and make it seem ridiculous. That was the primary motivation behind this cartoon.

The other thought here is that most of us modern folks in places like America have completely lost touch with where animal products come from and exactly what sights, sounds, and smells that entails. A hot dog stand like this one would likely get fewer customers but it shouldn’t. If you’re comfortable with where your animal food comes from and what that actually means, why turn a blind eye to the process? And if you’re not comfortable with it, perhaps it is time to change your habits. Unlike some of my posts from the past, I’m not advocating for either meat-eaters or vegetarians, I’m just saying facing the truth when making these kinds of lifestyle choices is probably a good thing.

One of the things I like about Mexico is that life isn’t sanitized and deodorized for the consumer’s comfort. Life here is a bit grisly and in your face. That feels more honest and gratifying to me than the mindless superstore, shopping mall culture of the U.S.

Some cats are so cranky.

I truly enjoyed the whole Trump-has-tiny-hands storyline that happened last summer when it was still unthinkable that such an unstable, insufferable clown could become president of the most powerful country in the world. It’s not as funny now, of course. In case you’re unaware, this story started way back in the late 1900s when a reporter (I think it was from Spy magazine?) said Trump had small hands, and then Trump spent the next many years trying to negate and disprove the comment every chance he got. Because nothing says “confidence in one’s manhood” like whining and pleading your case in the face of a childish, schoolyard accusation. When it came up again in the primaries last year, he spent waaaaaaaaaay too much time disputing it again. Trump’s lack of dignity and confidence about virtually everything is befitting a chair-throwing guest on a Jerry Springer episode.

The reason the hand thing makes him so uncomfortable, of course, is that small hands are supposed to be an indication that a person has a small penis. The fact that this childish, middle-school-gym-class discussion was even part of the presidential campaign was absurd and insulting to anyone with an I.Q. high enough to write their own name without silently mouthing the letters, but still it persisted.

And now he has the nuclear codes. Let’s hope a foreign leader doesn’t insinuate his wing-wang might be bigger than Trump’s or we might all be vaporized.

Even more childish than the Cheeto Mussolini’s obsession with his weiner is his habit of calling any journalism that contradicts his egomania, “fake news”.

On a more amusing note but still the same topic of America’s despicable political reality, Olive Oyl and I went into the town center today (called the “Jardin” here) to see what the local Mexicans were up to for Easter, which is a big deal lin Latin America. We’ve seen some religious processions and such this week, but today’s event was among the strangest I’ve ever encountered. Check out the links below as I explain it.

Apparently, the locals have a tradition of hanging effigies of people (real or fictional) that they believe have wronged them––the devil, historical or political characters––in the Jardin on Easter Sunday and blowing them up with explosives. (What this has to do with Easter is beyond my education or imagination.) Before it begins, there are numerous papier mâché characters hung on ropes (horizontal, like clothes lines, not vertical like a lynching) with three firecracker-type-things attached to a small hoop around their waist. They light the first one and it spews sparks, thus rotating the dummy (with the red bowtie in this pic). As the first firecracker reaches it’s end there’s a little “pop!”, then it lights the next one and it spews sparks and smoke and continues the rotation, then it pops and lights the third one, which does the same thing but ends with an ear-splittingly loud KABOOM! and the whole thing explodes into a million pieces. Then they move to the next figure. In all, there were around 20 characters today. Here’s a pretty cool devil effigyand here’s the unbelievably amazing photo of his explosion that Olive Oyl took on her iPhone. The entire extravaganza was a hoot but the best part was that the grand finale was an effigy of Donald Trump. (The sign on him says “DONALD pero no el pato” which translates to “Donald, but not the duck.”) Up until then, the crowd laughs and claps as each character is ignited and explodes but as the time wore on, the crowd began chanting “Donald! Donald!” until they finally lit him up. Here he is spinning. When he exploded, the crowd erupted for the first time in loud shouts and applause, as though the Mexican national team had just scored a goal in the World Cup. By my reckoning, the crowd was about half Mexicans and half gringos, and all of us enjoyed watching Trump disintegrate.

The macabre aspect of this exercise did not escape us, but it is a basic psychological fact that blowing off steam in this manner can be very therapeutic, and much better than going after the real politician with a noose. I believe this kind of public event has a healing effect on people and it is no secret that virtually all Mexicans and a majority of Americans despise DT. He would have had a very difficult time finding a friend in this town today.

It was so much better than an egg hunt and probably my favorite Easter ever.

Thanks for reading this far, Jazz Pickles. If you like my content and want to support me, click on one of the illustrations below and consider helping me keep this wagon rolling. All five of us here at Rancho Bizarro will appreciate it a whole big lot!

As you likely know, those “street view” images you can find online of just about any address in the civilized world are taken from contraptions attached to the tops of cars that just drive all over the world taking pictures of everything they pass. Some famously funny things have been captured by those pictures and they just lie quietly in wait on the Interwebs until people begin discovering them and spreading the word. There are gobs of pages dedicated to the funniest, strangest, most tragic things captured on Google Street View, which you can find by, of course, googling the topic.

In past blog posts I’ve mentioned that I bought a house in Mexico. One of the Jazz Pickles who participated in my survey recently (thanks to all who did!) mentioned that they thought it was a vacation house so I thought I should clear that up. Olive Oyl and I are not the sort of folks who can afford more than one place to live so we’re actually moving there full time in December and will no longer be living in the U.S.

After a few years of renting in the Los Angeles area, we recently decided to buy a house and found very quickly that we can’t afford to live anywhere in the U.S. that we would actually want to live. If it’s an attractive, liberal, artistic town with good weather, real estate prices are absurd. We’ve both always loved Mexico and one small, Spanish colonial mountain town in particular, so we started researching it and decided to buy a house there. For what would have been an average downpayment on a house in LA––that would then have been followed by 30 years of big payments each month––we bought a house for cash in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. So we’ll be living this new adventure debt free, which is a huge relief at this point in my life. I’ll keep you updated on the shenanigans as this story progresses.

Here’s a fun take on getting lost in art museums. I love visiting museums but I really dislike how difficult they are to navigate. I’m good with maps but sometimes I still get lost. Between art museums and Ikea stores, I think that by the end of my life I will have lost a couple of years to wandering around looking for exits.

I used to be in bands when I was young and though most musicians are not stupid enough to walk into glass windows, it isn’t hard to find ones who are.

More observant readers will notice that the macabre scene above is taking place in my beloved Olive Oyl’s bistro. She’s an amazing cook and a gifted hostess. Sadly, since Oyl’s Bistro is currently still in the fictional stage, you can’t go there for dinner tonight.

I did this clown version of Noah before I’d heard about the wave of scary clown panic that is plaguing American schools at the moment. If you’ve not heard about it, google it. It’s pretty ridiculous on many levels. I was particularly amused by the head of a big clown organization making a public service announcement video about how scary clowns are not “real” clowns. Hmm… I think that’s a matter of opinion, isn’t it?

Just as Donald Trump mentioned in his apology video this week that he has never said he was a “perfect person”––although to my recollection he’s rarely said anything else––I’ve never said I was above making a cartoon from a ridiculous pun. I won’t use just any pun for a cartoon, however. I have a set of criteria that I go by and two of them are “is it surprising?” and “does it make me smile?” This one cleared both bars so I used it. Someone commenting on a FB post of this cartoon said, “That’s stupid”. Yes, it is. Sometimes stupid is funny. Dr. Ben Carson is a good example.

I’m not a golfer but my dad was and I used to really enjoy caddying for him when I was barely big enough to schlep a golf bag. I occasionally used his adult-sized golf clubs to hit practice balls with and while thinking about this one day I wondered about the scenario illustrated above. Along the same lines, I’ve often thought that for me––at 5’7″ tall––to fully understand what game NBA players are playing, I’d have to use a basketball the size of a cantaloupe and a hoop that is only 8 feet off the ground.

That’s it for this week except for this big news: MY COLORING BOOK FOR GROWNUPS IS FINALLY OUT! You can order it on Amazon and other online book sellers, and it is beginning to appear in bookstores daily. I’ll be doing a couple of events here in Pasadena soon to publicize it.